Godfrey Huggins

Godfrey Huggins (6 July 1883-8 May 1971) was Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia from 12 September 1933 to 7 September 1953 (succeeding George Mitchell and preceding Garfield Todd) and of Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 7 September 1953 to 2 November 1956 (preceding Roy Welensky).

Biography
Godfrey Huggins was born in London, England in 1883, and he studied medicine and joined a medical partnership in the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury in 1911. Elected to the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Assembly in 1924, he left the ruling Rhodesia Party in 1931 and in 1932 became the leader of the Reform Party of Southern Rhodesia, which in 1933 merged with sections of the Rhodesia Party to form the United Rhodesia Party. An admirer of Jan Smuts, he advocated the "two-pyramids system", a modified version of racial segregation which allowed blacks self-administration for sanitation and education in their segregated reserves. He came to realize that the system became untenable as economic progress created an increasingly complex and interwoven economy and society, which led to the creation, for example, of a black middle class. Yet this stance was bitterly opposed by the white conservatives within and outside his party. He pushed for a union with Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in order to create a stable economy balanced by agriculture and mining, and to establish an imperial "bastion" against the growth of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, and of Black African independence movements in western Africa. He finally managed to persuade the British government to create the Central African Federation, whose Prime Minister he became until his retirement to his farm near Salisbury (now Harare).